Landscape Design Minimum Standards
When is it appropriate to use landscape design? How does one know when the process is finished? PLJV developed the following list of minimum standards that a landscape design plan should meet.
Benefits Partners within Partnerships
- Serves a specific need of a partner (a client) usually within a larger partnership-led effort
- Embodies a commitment by partners to implement conservation actions specified in the landscape conservation design
- Conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists and managers often including human dimensions specialists
Drives Effective and Efficient Conservation Action
- Addresses a definitive and measurable conservation goal or set of goals
- Addresses a specific or suite of specific current conservation programs and informs them as to need and development of new conservation practices/programs or change in how existing ones are used
- Informs location and magnitude of conservation action in an efficient manner
- Incorporates new information on landscape pattern and conservation progress iteratively, and nearly in real time (months not years)
Models Landscape Processes and Patterns
- Acknowledges the impact of humans: their role in creating landscape patterns via economic development, societal needs and cultural traditions
- Models processes that are thought to create current landscape patterns
- Predicts future processes that may maintain, change, exacerbate or create new landscape patterns
- Addresses all important processes and patterns simultaneously
Incorporates Specific Steps and/or Products
- Depends on accurate, high quality and recent spatial data
- Determines currently protected areas (i.e., conservation estate)
- Delineates permanent human infrastructure
- Evaluates progress toward the measurable goal at each step in the process
- Generates spatially explicit products that demonstrate attainment of the goal and can be stepped down to guide local conservation action
- Maintains listed assumptions and tests where needed/desired